Stonewood, WV

Stonewood is a small Harrison County city with a name built by committee—literally. Stonewall Park and Norwood were neighboring communities, and in 1947 local schoolchildren won a contest by combining the two names. The city now follows Elk Creek and sits in the Clarksburg-Bridgeport suburban orbit; the 2020 census counted 1,810 residents. That gives Stonewood a useful local shape: close to the county’s larger job and service centers, but still a separate city with its own council, fire department, streets, and municipal routines.

The city’s history is unusually easy to see in its civic buildings. Volunteers helped build the block city building on Southern Avenue in 1952, and it housed city offices and the fire department; the fire department moved to Plainwood Avenue in 1987. Today, cleanup weeks, the Christmas parade and tree lighting, and the Stonewood Firefighter’s Festival keep the calendar tied to city institutions, not one big commercial center. Stonewood is a compact West Virginia place where the name, the fire department, and the town hall all point back to the same postwar act of neighbors deciding to build one city out of two communities.